I'm losing track on what's new now...

Its been around a week and a half since my last post... how bad of me...

Anyway, a few of the days of were spent on getting my essay done for contextual studies, I wrote it on the difference between Western and Eastern game titles and why they differ. It was quite a fun essay to write and research but I had some trouble getting quotes for it...I was pretty pleased with what I managed in the end though...probably one of my better essays...hopefully...

As the title suggests, I'm flicking between bits of work all over the place at the moment, trying to get everything finished of at least in a workable state before the 1st submittal this Friday... I highly doubt everything will be working as I want by then, as the weapon script is proving more difficult than I anticipated...but hopefully by the time the final submittal roles round they should be working...

I'm saying hopefully a lot, that probably isn't good...

But on to work!

I've solved the wall lighting issue where a seam would appear about 3/4 of the way up the mesh and it didn't seem to show on any texture maps. It was just a smoothing groups issue...the amount of times that catches me out... but that's all sorted now, and I even went back and made a slight improvements to the wall while I was there.

I got around the issue of not being able to fire inside the cave as I was using 2 landscapes to make the holes for the cave, as you cant make holes in the landscape as its still in early development. To get around this I just made a quick mesh in 3DS Max and then stole the UDK texture I was using on the other cliffs. It's by no means ideal and it still needs work, but it proved to be a fairly simple, quick fix so I'm not complaining.

I have rescripted the crossbow weapon using the UT3 shock rifle files and adjusting the code. I'm not going to post it all here because it is really long and in 5 or so separate files. But basically I have the weapon in UDK and you can fire it. Although at the moment the crossbow is held sideways, it shoots giant arrows that don't face the right way and lasers shoot out of it and explode people...so yeah, not finalised yet. But I know how to solve most of them problems, or can at least work it out, the only thing I'm unsure about it the mesh emitter which is used to fire the arrows...but if worst comes to worst I can just use a particle emitter and try to make it look like a fast arrow.

Here's the crossbow being held wrong:

Here's the arrow not flying correctly:

As an added weapon bonus, I have the club pickup working, kinda... It's rotating above the pickup point fine, but I think the scale is too big and the pivot is just too high so when he holds it you can only make out the bottom of the handle, but that should be an easy change now that I have it working in game.

I've also made a flag tonight, working from since I left Uni and went shopping, I have managed to model, unwrap and skin a flag that will replace the default UT3 flag. It is 1144 polys, so that works out at 2288 tris in UDK. I have only got base textures on the flag at the moment, but I have a red and blue flag made on the same texture map so the team colours will work. I have not yet set up the physics and cloth on the flag yet so it is only static, but it should flow like the banners do on my environment.

I've made the game a Capture the Flag game mode now...but that only involves changing the prefix to the map name, but I have the flag capture points in now, so it's a playable CTF game!

Hmm, other things I have done...I have tweaked little bits of textures here and there, adding a few spots of mud or rips to the materials. But nothing too major there. Oh, and I made some blocking volumes to keep players for getting out of the level, it is a bit of a cheap way of keeping them in, but it saves no end of time play testing all the ways someone could escape from the map and then tweaking the map again so I'm not complaining.

An interesting error I have come across, which is almost 100% a user error not a program error, is that I have seemed to hide all of the textures and materials as well as deleting and not showing new actor classes. I have tried flicking it though all the different viewing modes but cant seem to figure it out, which is interesting...Luckily it's not just my map, the base UDK ones are like it too and the textures load when you play it, so I hopefully haven't horribly destroyed it a few days before 1st submission...

Makes it look snowy which is cool, but if anyone knows what has caused this could you just drop me a message with a fix? I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough but any time saved on this project is a massive help. Maybe I only need a computer restart or something...but hopefully it wont stick around and be a problem...

I just managed to get no errors or warnings while compiling the UDK scripts...so that's a nice little personal victory for me

I was writing this blog as I was working on my other screen and I'm just gob smacked at how fast I'm working at the moment, I cant keep up blogging with everything that's getting done, and that's a really good feeling

/Superlongblogpost

Caves and Script Changes

It's not been as long as usual since my last update but I'm going to try and update more often in smaller bites for the next few weeks as we're coming to the end of the project and there will be lots of changes and rushing about to come in the future, so here goes...

Possibly the biggest change I have made since the last update is texturing the cave. I have made a very quick diffuse map and quickly gone over it in Mudbox. I still need to improve it quite a bit but for how quick it was to make I think the results have turned out well.

There were a few problems with the unwrapping though, and that has continued to be a pain throughout the texturing of the cave, there are quite a few seams and they don't seem to be connecting well with the normal maps taken out of Mudbox. I seem to remember reading about a fix to this but to save time searching I manually went in with viewport canvas in 3DS Max to fill in the seams of the diffuse and normal maps.

I do intend to expand on this texture, adding unique parts to it in different rooms such as scratches or cave paintings, but that will most likely be a tweaking thing towards the end of the project. Here it is as it stands now though.

The cave itself was around 800 polys but I was getting some big smoothing issues, I applied meshsmooth to it which brought it up to around 3500 polys and I liked the result, plus it fixed my smoothing issues so I decided to keep it. The game still runs at about 33FPS while inside the cave as opposed to around 28FPS outside so the extra polys can be spared.

I have also added a few more of the rocks from outside in the cave to build on the walls as I intended to only build the outline of the cave in Max and then improve on it my adding rocks in UDK. Also doing it this way saves on memory as the rocks are already instanced in the scene so they do not take up as much memory as a brand new mesh.

I also thought that I would post the script for the weapons on here which I did a few weeks back incase anyone is interested in that or can point out any of the errors. I have them recognising the mesh in the game and have them doing damage when 'firing' but I have not yet set up the animations as I don't have them yet, and the meshes don't sit right in the 1st and 3rd person perspectives so I need to tweak the code to get them to sit right.

Here are the 2 files used to make the club work:

Here are the 2 that make the crossbow work:

And here is the bit of code that I changed in the script for the weapon pick up to change the static mesh to the one I have made:

All of the code there was taken from Epic's official UDK help pages at UDN and then edited to pick up my skeletal meshes and to have the amount of ammo and do the amount of damage ect that I want it to do in my game.

I have commented out (text in green) the animation sections for now as I don't have the animation files but I will fix them as soon as possible.

I intend to get the weapons working correctly in the next couple of weeks before the 1st submittal deadline, although that will probably be without the animations. Hopefully I can get that done and we will have a finished looking game ready to show by then, even if it will need quite a bit of tweaking.

So much for shorter blog posts....